February

Chapter 6 Second Sun, First Light

(Arlo)

February.

Even the name bruises.

It's a month that limps. Cold, quiet, soft around the edges like grief that never learned how to scream. February is the in-between, where light doesn't quite return and nothing blooms. It's waiting in the dark, breath held, wondering if spring will ever remember you.

She was named after it. Berrie, and now, she's leaving me in it.

My Berrie.

The letter is still in my hands. It's creased where I clutched too hard. Smudged with tears I didn't feel fall. My fingers tremble like they remember her—her touch, her warmth, the way she'd trace lazy shapes on my wrist when she thought I was asleep.

The words blur and re-form. Then blur again. I read them over and over until they stop making sense, then keep reading until they start again. Until the ache becomes a metronome. Until I forget how to breathe without hurting.

Some days change everything.

The first was the day my dad told me to go. He didn't yell. He didn't even look mad.

"We can't have you here anymore," he said. "She's pregnant. She's scared of how angry you get. It's not safe."

I didn’t understand what he meant. I wasn’t violent; I was just loud sometimes, still tangled up in my own feelings.

My mom was already gone, and now it felt like he was pushing me away too.

I was lost in a storm I didn’t even have a name for.

But when you’re a kid, it doesn’t matter what you meant, it only matters how they feel about you.

The second day was cold.

I walked across town with a half-charged phone, a bruised rib, and a backpack that smelled like rain.

I knocked on my cousin's door, praying family would mean something.

She opened it, stared, and said, "the place is too small.

You can't stay here." There wasn't cruelty in her voice. Just resignation.

The third day didn't feel like a day at all. It was the moment I realized I was homeless. Not just crashing on couches. Not just passing through.

Homeless.

Have you ever tried to fall asleep under a bridge, knowing you might not wake up?

You learn to listen to footsteps like thunder. You learn to breathe light, to shrink your body so it's less noticeable. You hook your backpack strap through your belt loop because if someone tries to steal it, at least you'll wake up to fight.

And then, out of the noise, out of the cigarette smoke and sirens and silence, came Lyra.

Wildfire in a crop top. Combat boots scuffed from running, from dancing, from kicking through the world like it owed her something. Red streaks in her hair like warning signs. A chain hanging off her belt, clinking like armor. She didn't ask who I was. She looked at me like she already knew.

"You look like a stray," she said, offering me a cigarette with this half-smile, like maybe she pitied me, or maybe she was just bored.

We became something fast. Something reckless. A crash in slow motion: beautiful, terrifying, impossible to stop. We wrapped around each other like ivy and rust. Twisting, climbing, strangling. We were Interdependent, addicted, starving and feeding each other at the same time.

She had storms of her own. Her dad would lock her out for days, just bolt the door and pretend she never existed.

Her mom had walked out when she was ten, and the silence left behind had teeth.

Lyra learned to survive in the cracks. She squatted in condemned houses, lifted snacks from corner stores, screamed herself hoarse at punk shows in basements with low ceilings and broken lights.

She made me feel invincible, and invisible, and then invincible again.

We tried things we shouldn't have. Pills with names we never asked. Nights that bled into mornings we didn't remember. But she also got me my first job, sweeping floors in this greasy little garage where her friend worked.

Told them, "He's quiet, but he's good with his hands." and just like that. Like I was worth something. I was now useful. It was the first kind thing anyone had said about me in years.

I fell for her completely, with a force I hadn’t known I was capable of, and I fell fast, tumbling headlong into the gravity of her. The first time she said no, it didn’t push me away, it only made the ache for her grow sharper, more insistent.

She liked that, I realized, the thrill of being chased, the tension of the game, the delicate dance of push and pull, the way hearts unravel slowly when they’re meant to.

She taught me how to burn without burning out, how to stretch desire into something patient and consuming.

I followed her everywhere, eager and willing, like a puppy desperate for attention, hoping with everything in me that one day she would look at me and see that I was enough.

She wasn't love. She was addiction.

And like any addiction, it was beautiful and comfortable, but at the end of the day, it was still poison.

I didn't know how to love her, not really. So I wrote. Letters I never gave her. Notes scribbled on napkins and gum wrappers and the backs of receipts.

I wrote about the way her laugh sounded when she broke the rules, like she'd just robbed the world blind and dared it to come after her.

I wrote about the way her lip twitched when she lied, just the tiniest tremble.

I wrote about how the world seemed to tilt when she walked into a room, like gravity bent to her mood.

Once, I slipped a note into the inside pocket of her denim jacket.

She found it and laughed: "Jesus, you turning into a soap opera?

" she teased. Then she kissed me so hard my lip split, and she licked the blood like it was honey.

That was her love language. Violence with a grin and passion like punishment.

So I stopped showing her. But I never stopped writing. It became my own secret religion.

Pages folded into the glove compartment. Letters tucked in the lining of my coat.

A drawer full of paper hearts she would never open.

I wrote her sonnets on receipts.

Scrawled poetry on napkins.

Tattooed a symbol for her on my skin.

But the truth is—Loving Lyra was setting myself on fire just to keep her warm.

She wasn't the gentle kind of love. Not soft and not safe. She was chaos. She was a siren song for boys who never learned how to swim. She'd dance barefoot on broken glass, scream at the moon, kiss with teeth, and vanish for days without saying goodbye.

I worshipped her. Because when you've been thrown away enough times, even someone's chaos feels like care.

She said "You're mine" like a spell, and I believed her. Wore those words like armor. Or maybe like a leash. It didn't matter. I was hers in a very twisted way.

The sex was chaos. So were the fights. We screamed, we vanished, we made up in parking lots and backseats. She'd flirt to make me jealous and I'd rage to make her stay. We were beautiful in all the worst ways.

But one day, everything shifted. I found out she was seeing someone else.

Some older guy with a suit, a car, and a life that wasn't made of ash and broken rules.

At first, I thought it was just another game.

She always flirted to make me jealous, and I'd bite like a fool, every single time. But this was different.

She started to change. Her clothes. Her tone. Her silence. She wore blouses instead of band tees.

Stopped screaming at strangers. She began to vanish for whole days, and when she came back, she was distant, polished, and unreachable.

Then one day, she just... came and took her things. I asked her what was happening. She said, "I found something beautiful."

Something beautiful.

Like what we had wasn't. Like I hadn't burned my soul just to keep hers from crumbling. She told me she'd been falling for this man for months. That we weren't good together.

"We're toxic, Arlo. We're chaos. I want peace now."

Peace? She was chaos, and I was the fool who thought that meant love.

When she left, I wasn't just heartbroken. I was nothing. I didn't know who I was without her.

I'd always been Lyra's man. Her boyfriend. Her fighter. Her fool.

Without her, I was no one. No name. No story.

Just a boy who'd been built around someone who didn't want him anymore.

I wrote even more after that. I wrote like I was bleeding. Wallowing in the loss of her love—her love, which I thought was singular and unique, a love that only exists once in a lifetime.

Until I met Berrie and Berrie fascinated me in ways I didn't know were possible.

Where Lyra burned, Berrie glowed.

Where Lyra screamed, Berrie whispered.

Where Lyra burst into the world like a storm, Berrie brought it to life like a mural, each stroke quiet, deliberate, and full of intention.

She'd look at engine parts with the same curiosity she looked at street murals and animated backgrounds. She'd talk about shadows in art and lighting in anime with the kind of intensity most people reserved for religion. She'd dance alone when she thought no one was looking.

She'd fix things, wires, buttons, broken coffee machines with her sleeves rolled up and a look of gentle concentration that made me fall for her all over again.

She didn't light me on fire. She loved me in slow, steady degrees, and that scared the hell out of me because I didn't know how to exist without chaos. I didn't know how to deserve someone like her. Maybe I never did because she left.

And part of me, God, part of me is angry that she wouldn't talk to me. That Yesterday was her goodbye.. That she didn't yell, didn't slam doors, didn't give me the decency of a fight.

She just... left.

But then I remember, that was always her way. She wasn't confrontational. She didn't scream when she was hurt. She would just shut down. She got quiet. She left when she felt unwanted. She didn't burn bridges; she disappeared before they ever caught fire.

Maybe that's what makes it worse because I know why she did it. The larger part of me sees it now from her side. Reading those damn letters and finding pieces of me that she never got.

How could she not feel like a placeholder?

How could she not feel like second best?

When she was the best. The best, and I never said it.

I forgot about Lyra. I really did, but not at first.

At first, she was still there, in the corners of my mind, in the muscle memory of bracing for chaos. In the instinct to flinch when love got too close, too soft, too steady. She lingered like smoke and like the smell of something burnt long after the fire is out.

But the more I knew Berrie, the more she seeped into me in the way rain seeps into dry ground.

The more I heard her laugh, the more her voice settled into the cracks of my day.

The more I watched her move through the world with this effortless kind of grace, the less room there was for anything else.

Berrie didn't replace Lyra. She just made her... irrelevant.. And somewhere between the quiet mornings and shared dinners, between soft touches and conversations that didn't end in explosions—I forgot.

I forgot about the letters altogether. I never wrote anything for her because I was scared. Scared she'd find it cheesy like Lyra did. Scared she'd laugh or roll her eyes or say "I know," the same dismissive way someone else once did.

After all... it's not like I had a model to follow for love. No blueprint. No father to teach me. No past that made it safe. So I loved her quietly and reservedly, but truthfully. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe she mistook my silence for indifference. My restraint for apathy, and now she's gone.

"I would have done anything—anything—to be the heroine in one of your letters."

You were. You are. I just never gave you the pages, and now you'll never read the story you inspired.

"You deserve to be happy, Arlo. Even if it will never be with me."

Please. Please don't let that be the ending. So don't write yourself out of my story like it's some kind of mercy. Like it's the kindest thing you can do. Because there's nothing kind about pretending I'm better off without the one person who made my life feel real.

You were the stillness after years of noise. The quiet after the fight. The peace I didn't know I'd earned. I ruined it with silence, with fear, and with ghosts I should've buried long before you walked into my life.

Now I'm here, alone, surrounded by letters I never meant to send and echoes of things I never meant to leave unsaid.

I wipe my face with the back of my hand, but it doesn't help. The tears don't stop. My chest hurts in that hollow and helpless way.

She's gone.

God. I let her feel unwanted. She read my past and believed it was my present. She thought she was second best. Thought I loved her less. That she was a placeholder and a soft patch on an old wound that still bled.

Why wouldn't she? I wrote the last letter while we were already living together. I remember that moment.

She was in the kitchen, barefoot, humming some old song off-key, her voice dancing through the apartment like sunlight on a wall. The scent of garlic and rosemary drifted through the air, soft and warm and alive.

And I sat there watching her move like she belonged in that space, like we belonged.

And it hit me, like something I'd never known I was allowed to have. This, this, was the life I used to dream about from concrete steps and broken benches and borrowed beds. This was the warmth I'd been chasing through storms and chaos and nights that swallowed me whole.

And Lyra... Lyra felt like a ghost in that moment. A distant, flickering light from a past life I barely recognized. Not a wound, not a longing, just a memory. A moment I had lived through, survived, and left behind.

I remember blinking hard, like I didn't trust what I was seeing. Berrie in my hoodie, stirring pasta, humming like the world had never hurt her. Like the world had never hurt me. I realized, I was no longer waiting for the good part to begin.

It was here. It was her.

I thought I'd only ever know love in extremes, Fights and fire, ache and adrenaline. But Berrie taught me the beauty of soft things, of quiet mornings, and shared coffee and a voice singing off-key just to make the day lighter.

So I picked up a pen, quietly, reverently. I realised,

She is good. But she isn't Lyra.

And that messed with me in ways I didn't know how to name, because that's not a comparison, It's a revelation.

For so long, I thought "good" had to look like chaos. Like smoke in your lungs and heat in your veins. I thought love had to be loud, creaming matches and slammed doors and kisses that tasted like war.

Lyra burned me down, and I thanked her for the match.

I thought that was how it was supposed to feel.

So when Berrie came along, with her quiet kindness, with eyes that didn't flinch when they looked at me, it broke something open.

She didn't try to fix me. She didn't love me like I was a project or a problem or a wound that needed stitching.

But Lyra taught me love was a battlefield. A game with rules that changed every day.

If she was cold, I had to earn warmth. If she was gone, I had to bleed to bring her back. It was predictable in its unpredictability. That rhythm, passion, pain, apology, repeat, was all I knew.

It hurt, yeah. But at least I understood it.

There was comfort in the storm because I thought I belonged in it.

Lyra was my first sun. She burned hot and wild, pulled me out of the dark when I didn't know how to save myself. She got me off the street, gave me fire when all I had was cold. But it was chaos—beautiful, blinding chaos. She woke me up, yeah... but she scorched me too.

But Berrie? She disrupted all of that.

She was calm in a way that felt louder than shouting. She smiled at my worst days like they didn't scare her. She didn't play games or keep score.

She didn't make me beg. She just gave gently and fully, without needing a reason. Her love was a steady pulse.

Berrie was my second sun but my first light.

She brought warmth to my life. She didn't rescue me from the dark, but she showed me I could live in the light.

I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know how to believe it, because if someone loves you without hurting you first, without testing your limits or making you prove yourself...

How can you be sure they mean it?

How can you trust it when it doesn't break you?

Berrie looked at me like I wasn't broken, like I wasn't too much, or too little. Like I was just... enough, and I didn't know how to handle that.

Because part of me kept waiting for her to become Lyra. But she didn't.

So yeah. She's not Lyra, and for a long time, that made me feel like something was missing. But I was wrong. It wasn't that something was missing. It was that something was healing, and I didn't recognize the feeling.

Because love without chaos? Love without destruction? Love that holds, instead of hurts? It's good but ..unfamiliar. It's terrifying, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever known.

She's not Lyra, no, and thank God for that. Because I don't need someone to burn me alive to feel something. I want someone to remind me I'm worth loving.

Berrie did. She loved and cared and stayed. Until she didn't.

And today...

Today is another one of those days. The ones that split your life into Before and After.

I realize now... maybe the common thread in all these goodbyes is me. Maybe I'm the reason they all leave.

It's a pattern. A rhythm I can't seem to break. People come into my life like music. They fill every room with sound, and then one day...the song ends. The door closes.

The silence returns, and I'm left standing there in my hands love letters no one wants to read.

But I know this— Berrie wasn't just another song. She was the silence after that teaches you the difference between being alone...and being left behind.

It breaks me that I failed to say and write my love for her in the way she needed.

That the words stayed trapped behind fear and silence, But God, I thought I showed her.

Even now, with her letter trembling in my hands, I'd still choose her, every time.

Even if all I get is the quiet she left behind.

I will convince her that she was never an afterthought. Never second best.

That she was, and still is, everything.